Chicago Booth MBA News

For those happy applicants who now hold acceptance letters from their target business schools, there still may be important work ahead: namely, breaking the news to your current employer. In a post to the Forté Foundation’s Virtual Campus website, a Forté Fellow at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business shares some tips for telling your boss you're headed to business school. Tricia Felice, Chicago Booth MBA 2014, tells us her best practices for how to approach this task with tact and technique – maintaining valuable relationships that could serve you in the future. Felice left a full-time job in Los Angeles to start her MBA program. She is the recipient of a fellowship through the Forté Foundation, an organization dedicated to increasing the number of women in MBA programs and business leadership. “Telling my boss about my decision was difficult, but it helped to remain focused on the personal progress I knew I would experience through my MBA,” she wrote. Read more

Welcome once again to Trivia Tuesday, our regular exploration of the special programs and opportunities that differentiate the leading business schools. Today we're featuring an excerpt from the Clear Admit School Guide to the University of Chicago Booth School of Business about the school's academic calendar. "While many schools arrange their academic years into two semesters, Chicago divides the year into four quarters that correspond with the seasons. This quarter system was invented by William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago, as a means of exposing students to more material than the traditional semester system allows. The quarter-based calendar is used by all schools at the University of Chicago, as well as at several other leading business schools, including Stanford, Tuck and Kellogg. "The standard academic year spans Autumn, Winter and Spring Quarters, and MBA students occasionally take courses in Summer Quarter as well. However, since most Chicago Booth students choose to take an internship between their first and second years, enrollment in summer courses is not the norm. Read more

Our 2014 Admissions Director Q&A with the University of Chicago Booth School of Business' Kurt Ahlm is now available.  Kurt Ahlm is a 10-year veteran of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business admissions office, and he seemed the perfect person to take the lead role there when former director Rose Martinelli stepped down two summers ago. Since then he has helped welcome a new dean to the school, Dean Sunil Kumar, and seen the school continue its international expansion with the opening of a new center in China to complement campuses in Chicago, London and Singapore. Ahlm started his career in undergraduate admissions at Northwestern University and then spent time working as a corporate recruiter before coming to Chicago Booth. “I really liked higher education but I also liked the more professional type of atmosphere that the corporate world offered,” he says, adding that MBA admissions provides a great mix of both. Chicago Booth benefits, in turn, from his strong background in both admissions and recruiting. Read more